Julius – Maximilians – Universität Würzburg

Neuphilologisches Institut

Aufbaumodul Englische Literaturwissenschaft: “Schlüsseltexte der Literatur- und Kulturtheorie”

Ralph Pordzik, Prof. Dr.

Sommer Semester 2014

Reading “Lady Lazarus”

Approaching the poetry of Sylvia Plath

September 1, 2014

Christopher Scholz

Friedenstraße 49a

97072 Würzburg

Amerikanistik, Anglistik, Modernes Chinesisch (B.A.)

6th Semester

Matr. No. 1797386

Table of Contents

1. Introduction......................................................................................................................................3

2. Reading “Plath the person”..............................................................................................................4

3. Defying “the Author”.......................................................................................................................6

3.1 The “fragment” Lady Lazarus...................................................................................................6

3.2 Reading “the Holocaust”...........................................................................................................9

4. Reading “Of Other Spaces”............................................................................................................11

5. Reading “Camp Poetry”.................................................................................................................13

6. Conclusion......................................................................................................................................15

7. Bibliography...................................................................................................................................16
 1 Introduction

Sylvia Plath’s poetry has been a widely discussed subject ever since her death and the
posthumous release of her final collection of poems, Ariel. As Linda Wagner-Martin notes:
Ted Hughes' releasing of his version of the collection, started the “cult of Plath.” (Wagner-
Martin, 1999: X) This is a most fitting statement, as her poetry is often read through a
biographical approach, trying to find the person Sylvia Plath in her work. It is a culturally
constructed search for a unique author, trying to force an imaginary person upon the text. One
of the most susceptible poems is “Lady Lazarus”, part of Ariel and the famous “October
Poems.” However, a fully biographical reading of the poetry will not do justice to the multiple
layers of meaning to be found in these texts.
The following paper will make an attempt in reading Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus”
under the aspect of “the author.” The assumption is that while the poem invites a biographical
reading due to its theme of suicide and depression, it ultimately tries to accomplish the very
opposite task, actively defying the construction of a genuine author. By utilizing Roland
Barthes ideas in his influential essay “Death of the Author” as the theoretical basis, the
narrative structure of the poem will be analyzed to understand how exactly the author as a real
existence is negated and instead deconstructed. Emphasis will be put on the Holocaust
imagery Plath makes repeated use of. Furthermore, an analysis of the spaces represented in
“Lady Lazarus” through Michel Foucault’s “On Other Spaces” will extend the motif of the
imaginary author onto a spatial level. The last chapter will negotiate in how far Sylvia Plath’s
poem can be read as “Camp” when being analyzed under the theoretical idea of the “death of
the author.”
Beforehand, the following chapter will make a short attempt in reading the poem
biographically, trying to find Sylvia Plath in the figure of Lady Lazarus. It will give insight
into why such a reading might be easy to accomplish, eventually though fails to capture the
various levels of meaning and inconsistency. As Susan Gubar notes: “Plath's poetry broods
upon […] the contamination of the very idea of the genuine.” (Gubar, 2007: 181)

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 2 Reading “Plath the person”

Over the years Sylvia Plath and her poetry has often been understood as a “confessional
poet”, or as “confessional poetry” respectively, a term coined by M. L. Rosenthal in the 1959
volume of Life Studies. (cf. Bawer, 2007: 7) Mistaking confessionalism “as something that
aspired not to the aesthetic excellence so much as to the total honesty of the psychiatrist's
couch,” (8) a tendency of reading the author Sylvia Plath herself into her poetry emerged.
Following this tendency, Caroline Hall detects Plath in “Lady Lazarus” as being the lyrical
“I”: “The speaker is the poet herself, 'the magician's girl who does not flinch ('The Bee
Meeting'), a sort of circus freak lady.” (Hall, 1998: 108) Obviously, Plath's life, and often her
work itself, invites to fall for the trap and simply attempt to find the “ultimate truth,” the
author in her poems, to analyse it and eventually see Sylvia Plath emerging out of the poem.
Accordingly, Bawer, drawing on Plath's supposed self-envisaging as a victim of her said to be
draconian father and her later husband Ted Hughes, describes the incidence that Plath was
becoming a leading figure of the women's movement after her death was rather due to her
“usefulness” for the movement, as opposed to her real affection to feminist poetry. (cf. 2007:
8) As Bawer concludes:

For such readers, patently, the real interest lies not in Plath's art but in her life. And her
life – from her childhood in Jamaica Plain, Winthrop, and Wellesley, Massachusetts,
through her undergraduate career at Smith and two Fulbright years at Cambridge, to
marriage, motherhood in Devon and London, the beginnings of literary prominence,
marital estrangement, and self-slaughter at thirty – is fascinating, though not on the
superficial level that such readers tend to focus upon. (9)

As a result, if reading “Lady Lazarus” autobiographical, one is compelled to declare the

motif of death and rebirth to an immediate and metonymic major theme of the poem. As such,
Lady Lazarus is representing, as Hall illustrates, the author herself. “I have done it again. /
One year in every ten / I manage it.“ While “it” remains undefined, the “nine times to die” the
lyrical “I” has elucidate the connection to being reborn after dying. However, the lyrical “I”
remains silent over the actual reasons for her untimely death: “The first time it happened I
was ten. / It was an accident. / The second time I meant / To last it out and not come back at

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all.” However, due to the rebirth being the reason for the “miracle” and the “peanut
crunching-crowd / Shov[ing] in to see” the “accident” in line 36 seems not to refer to some
deadly accident, but rather to the circumstances that a comeback from death was not planned.
Consequently, her death was a deliberate attempt at committing suicide. Obviously suicide is
the ultimate signified that comes to mind when thinking of Sylvia Plath as a person (and
probably as well when thinking of her as a poet), due to her first attempt on August 24 in
1953, and her eventual death through suicide on February 11 in 1963. (cf. Wagner-Martin,
1999: VIIIf.)
Her depressions and eventual death were often understood as the consequence of her
defencelessness against the patriarchal figures in her life, especially her father Otto Emil
Plath. Due to his patriarchal status and his academic status, possibly forcing Plath into a pure
answering of his claims, the “Herr Doktor” and “Herr Enemy” Lady Lazarus is speaking to
does allude to both his overall position, as well as to his German ancestry. (cf. 4f.) It is this
patriarchal force Lady Lazarus is fighting against, which she tries to overcome when she
eventually reverses the roles. Instead of being under the male gaze, of being consumed in
parts, she is the one who can prevail against the authority of her father, and the authority of
male gender in general. She is eating “men like air,” occupying a new social position in order
to take the male role and ideological power and turns it against them. The “smiling woman” is
becoming an avenging angel, born out of the “ash” left by the oppression of her father, Otto
Emil, and her husband, Ted Hughes.
However, reading Sylvia Plath's poetry as “Sylvia Plath” does not manage to grasp the
hidden implications of the deconstruction of the “myth Plath” itself that lie within many of her
poems. As the following chapter will prove, analysing “Lady Lazarus” carefully will reveal
that it refuses to accept the lyrical “I” as the author, rather it turns around the thought of the
author as a stable existence, transcending it into a constructed fragment that is fetishised and
conformed to the expectations of the consuming crowd. Reading Sylvia Plath's work
autobiographically, as Jo Gill notes, “risks identifying Plath the person so closely with the
voice of the poems that the aesthetic, distancing, artful qualities of the work are overridden.”
(2008: 121)

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 3 Defying “the Author”

As mentioned before, “Lady Lazarus” is not advocating a biographical reading, but

instead tries to illustrate the artificiality of the search for an author through the desire for an
imaginary construction of a person, being the creator of a certain work, or certain art. The
following subchapters will give an insight into both the level of meaning and stylistic
approach “Lady Lazarus” takes in intensifying this reading.

3.1 The “fragment” Lady Lazarus

Roland Barthes' possibly most influential work is his essay on “The Death of the
Author”, released in 1967. Barthes' main premise is that the author as a person to be
discovered in the interpretation of literature is a capitalist construct, the result of an ideology
that puts greatest emphasis on the emergence of a genuine creator. (cf. 1988: 168) Instead, he
suggests that in order “to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the
birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.” (172) Plath's poem “Lady
Lazarus” goes to great efforts at deconstructing the idea of a specific author at the bottom of a
text and performs it like a reflection of society's relentless desire. Important for this aspect is
Plath's choice for a lyrical “I”, what Paul Mitchell calls a “stable authorial 'I'-dentity” (2005:
38), consistent in all of her late poems. By using this “I-dentity” she imposes the search for a
biographical approach to reading “Lady Lazarus”, ultimately bound to fail as she turns the
search against the one seeking. After all, the audience trying to find her in the poem is the
“peanut crunching-crowd” trying to dismantle every single piece of the work of the author:
“Them unwrap me hand and foot – / The big strip tease. / Gentlemen, ladies / These are my
hands / My knees.” The image of a striptease is a powerful metaphor for the predatory quest
of finding her, ultimately tearing down her cloths, leaving no space to withdraw from the
spotlight, the public view.
It is a penetrating gaze that pierces Lady Lazarus: “There is a charge / For the eyeing of
my scars, there is a charge / For the hearing of my heart – / It really goes. / And there is a
charge, a very large charge / For a word or touch / Or a bit of blood / Or a piece of my hair or

6
clothes.” Repeating the undressing process by the use of “clothes”, Plath juxtaposes the author
person with an exhibit shown on a fair, a monster having “call” and living in “cell.” It echoes
what Barthes understands as the capitalist ideology that underlies the quest for the author, the
“charge” that has to be paid in order to see her, in order to pierce her with the penetrating,
desiring gaze, in order to understand her: “The explanation of a work is always sought in the
man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less
transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author 'confiding' in us.”
(Barthes, 1988: 168)
Lady Lazarus is therefore representing the author being under the pressure of producing
art while keeping in harmony with the desires of her “fans”, the audience that is forcing her
into the striptease, that wants to unravel her, analyse her very person through her poetry. Plath
follows a strategy that, according to Barthes, was instituted by Proust. She uses Lady Lazarus
as a possible author person, but in fact it is only representing a fragment of the fictional author
that is demonstrated in the poem. (cf. 169) The suicide as an image becomes the “ultimate
signified” for the author, and Lady Lazarus, as her fragment, “performs” this suicide, displays
it to the audience: “To give a text an author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with
a final signified, to close the writing.” (171) The author functions as the legitimation of
literary criticism, of being capable of the power of find an ultimate truth. The author is just
what is constituted by the penetrating gaze of the critics.
If further following Barthes it can be concluded that “it is language which speaks, not
the author; to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality […], to reach that point where
only language acts, 'performs' and not 'me'.” (168) Lady Lazarus therefore is in no way the
author, confused as such by the “crowd.” Instead she is the language of the different works
and texts that comes to live again and again, that “acts, performs.”

Dying / Is an art, like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell. / I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call. / It's easy enough to do it in a cell.
It's easy enough to do it and stay put. / It's the theatrical
Comeback in broad day / To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout: / 'A Miracle!'

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She is coming back to the “same place, same face, same brute,” the same critics and
interpreters as before, who cannot stop to consume her poetry. She has no other choice but
follow suit and “imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original.” (170) However,
Lady Lazarus ultimately manages to invert this power and to use it against the audience: “And
I eat men like air.” While this is a polyvalent line, it indicates that Lady Lazarus has the real
power of consumption inherent, eating them “like air,” for their interpretations are nothing but
just that: Air.
However, Lady Lazarus severs a purpose beyond defying the author, substituting it with
a fragment to be confused with a real person. Michel Foucault, building up on Roland
Barthes' idea, acknowledges an inherent power of writing above going “beyond its own rules
and [transgressing] its limits.” (Foucault, 1988: 198) For him writing has the power of eluding
death, to “postpone the day of reckoning that would silence the narrator.” (198) Likewise,
Lady Lazarus is performing her own death as a means of escaping it, of having the power to
“rise out of the ash” and to eventually claim the power of consumption for herself. It is a
contradictory task she fulfils, writing death in order to escape it. Furthermore, Foucault
comments on the highly problematic subject of deferring the “author” onto his work (cf. 199),
what Barthes understands as a collapsing of referent and signifier into the art crafted by the
author. (cf. Barthes, 1988: 170) On the same note, Lady Lazarus' work is expanded to her
“clothes”, “skin”, “hair”, even her “blood” and her “heart.” It is a demand to participate in the
suffering of the author, to experience his feelings:

She dismisses the vulgar audience that 'Shoves in to see' her 'big strip tease' […], at the
same time as the reader of the supposedly 'high' art of poetry is berated for enjoying
her pain as aesthetic fodder: her rejection of the absorbed voyeurs forms an instance
of Plath's questioning of the 'seeming innocence of our preoccupations' with images of
suffering. (Rowland, 2005: 34)

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 3.2 Reading “the Holocaust”

One major motif of the poem is its allusion to the Holocaust and the figure of Ilse Koch.
While heading into the same direction as the general defying of the “author”, it emphasises
the process of forced assembly between the author and his work: “'Lady Lazarus' satirises
people who are 'in thrall to the trivial, the sensual, the spectacular', and highlights the
difficulty for contemporaneous audiences in separating recent history from sensational
reportage.” (Rowland, 2005: 29) Gubar further understands the use of the lyrical “I” as an
absent personification, termed “prosopopoeia”. (cf. Gubar, 2007: 165f.) “Lady Lazarus”
makes use of this stylistic device in order to underline the own enrichment gained through the
medial “slaughter”:

Have Jews been made to perform the Trauerspiel for a “peanut-crunching crowd” at
the movies and on TV, like the striptease entertainer through whom Plath speaks?
Does Lady Lazarus's 'charge' at making death feel 'real' and at 'the theatrical //
Comeback' anticipate a contemporary theatricalization of the Holocaust? Certainly,
her vengeful warning that 'there is a charge / For the hearing of my heart' evokes the
charge – the cheap thrill and the financial price and the emotional cost – of
installations, novels, testimonials, college courses, critical essays, and museums
dedicated to the six million. (180)

In this very instance, what is left of Lady Lazarus after her death is not what the suspected
Nazis “Herr Doktor, Herr Enemy” make out of her. Rather it is what the condemning crowd is
keeping alive in memory and media. And it, again, evokes the idea of the search for the
author, legitimising the allusion to Holocaust. She is taken apart, reduced to “A cake of soap, /
A wedding ring, / A gold filling,” by the fanatical crowd desiring her and her work up to a
point where they eventually end in a cannibalistic act of reducing Lady Lazarus to these
items. Those images kept alive are “media obsessions with the more macabre details of the
Holocaust […] such as the Buchenwald lampshade made out of human skin, and soap
reputedly manufactured out of human fat.” (Rowland, 2005: 29)
The figure of Ilse Koch on the other hand brings the allusion down to an identifiable
basis. Being the wife of Buchenwald director Karl Otto Koch she was fetishized into a media

9
spectacle after the war, bringing her in contact with a lampshade allegedly made out of human
skin, the “Nazi lampshade” Lady Lazarus compares herself with. Rowland concludes that
Koch has become an icon for Nazi chic, being the target of various medial exploitations,
eventually leading to Ilse – She-Wolf of the SS, a seventies torture softcore porn film. (cf. 30)
Plath makes deliberate use of these Nazi chic icons, deconstructing their value as
documentation and revealing them as myths, constituted solely through the postwar interest:
“The Holocaust icons are not self-evident signs of atrocity in 'Lady Lazarus', but citations of
citations.” (30) Metaphors are stretched to a point were they stop functioning to emphasise not
only “the artifice of the October poems, and the potentially camp nature of poetry” (32), but
to detect the constructed cultural meaning behind these images. It is encapsulating a pervert
desire that Mitchell detects as a main topic around the reading and criticism of Sylvia Plath's
poetry: “[...] Plath-as-author exists as a fetishized object, as an illusory eradication of the
reader's desire, and, in this sense, that a biographical reading of her work cannot appreciate
the effect that the unstable poetic voice has within the work/on the reader.” (Mitchell, 2005:
38)
The Holocaust imagery therefore is not an inconsiderate attempt of self-pity, as
sometimes criticized, instead it is a conscious allegory for the very condition of both the
Holocaust itself as a cultural “spectacle”, violently preyed upon, and the same driving force
that lies at the bottom of the desire for the finding of a genuine author. The difficulty in
understanding this criticism is brought to the point by Rowland:

However, the critic must concede that in Plath's poems it is sometimes unclear where
the unreflective reproduction of such Holocaust icons ends, and the satire begins. […]
[I]t criticises an unreflective reception of spectacle, at the same time as the camp
poetics suggest that Plath might be turning tragic, historical figures into clowns.
(Rowland, 2005: 29)

Nonetheless, transcending historical figures into “clowns” is following the general

pattern of the poem, as with Lady Lazarus only being able to surpass her oppressors by
consuming them, just as she was consumed. The transcending is the way in which society is
turning the Holocaust into a media spectacle, and it is the way in which the poem turns this
morbid pleasure against the audience.

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 4 Reading “Of Other Spaces”

Another essay by Michel Foucault serves as useful when analysing the “author”
question in Sylvia Plath's “Lady Lazarus”: “Of Other Spaces.” In his essay Foucault
investigates the different types of cultural spaces and their physical representation in our
society: “We are in the epoch of simultaneity; we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch
of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed.” (Foucault, 1986: 22) What Foucault
generally distinguishes in his essay are “utopias,” cultural spaces that exist in the imaginary,
without a real physical form of representation. It represents a culture in its ultimate and ideal
form, or at least how this specific culture imagines this form. Opposed to them are the so-
called “heterotopias,” representing the real places of cultural space. Foucault further divides
the idea of “heterotopia” into “heterotopias of crisis” and “heterotopias of deviation.” While
the former represents a space in which to place individuals of a society currently in a form of
crisis, that marks them as “other.” However, these heterotopias are replaced by the latter type,
the “heterotopias of deviation.” These new kinds of heterotopia form a place for the deviated,
for the culturally and societally undesired. It is a shifting from an accepted and supported
“otherness” to a rejection of inappropriate symptoms. (cf. 24f.)
When reading “Lady Lazarus”, this essay helps in understanding how the different
spaces in the poem support and emphasise the rejection of the author as a real being. Lady
Lazarus as a person is located in a heterotopia of deviation, a concentration camp, after all a
place for those who were undesired during the reign of the NSDAP in Germany. Her “crime”
is her will to die, “To last it out and not come back at all.” As such, she is contradicting to the
modern trend of seeing death as an illness: “The dead, it is supposed, bring illnesses to the
living, and it is the presence and proximity of the dead right beside the houses, next to the
church, almost in the middle of the street, it is this proximity that propagates death itself.”
(25) Accordingly Lady Lazarus has to be kept away from society, hidden away in the distant
space of the KZ. However, Lady Lazarus is also representing a space herself, a space that
attracts the “peanut-crunching crowd” to come and watch the deviated. The reason is her
“Comeback in broad day,” for she is the defeater of death itself, the reason why she is pushed
away from the internal spaces of society. She is creating an utopia, the society in its perfect
form, not forced to die but able to live on forever. This utopia defies the temporal aspect of
heterotopias that Foucault detects: “Heterotopias are most often linked to slices in time –

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which is to say that they open onto what might be termed […] heterochronies.” (26) Lady
Lazarus is capable of overcoming this limited temporality, she is inheriting all epochs, a
property Foucault only acknowledges to the “immobile place” (26) of the museum. Following
this idea, she is not only the defeater of death, but of time as well. And she is not limited to
this immobility, but instead flexible, performing “The big strip tease.”
Nevertheless, this utopian space of immortality that Lady Lazarus is constituting is a
forced one. Foucault mentions a connection between heterotopias and utopias, “a sort of
mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror.” (24) In this case the mirror is the male
gaze that is directed at Lady Lazarus, that undresses her and extracts every little detail that can
be found. Lady Lazarus, or rather the person this fragment is representing, is still a real
existence, but the gaze, and therefore the authorial power exerted by the “crowd” is forcing
her into a role, to “perform” the utopia the crowd desires, that it wants to experience. And
Lady Lazarus manages to perform it well, so it “feels real.” The juxtaposition between the “art
of dying” and the “theatrical” Lady Lazarus is speaking of emphasises her positioning on a
stage, a space where a supposed look “behind the curtain” is possible. But instead it is only an
imagination, a stage performance and therefore will always be an utopia. And Lady Lazarus'
limited “reentry” into the heterotopian space of the crowd is as well not an intentional
process, but likewise forced. “Heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and
closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable. […] To get in one must have a
certain permission and make certain gestures.” (26) Lady Lazarus' gesture is her striptease,
her own revealing to “Herr Doktor.”
Alluding to the space of a clinic, or the KZ for that matter, through the use of “Doktor,”
the poem arouses the idea of a space where the “visitor” is forced to completely disclose his
person, his body and his consciousness. She is not left with anything, instead she turns into a
pile of ash, she transcends into an “opus,” his “valuable, The pure gold baby.” The “Doktor's”
very personal utopia of how Lady Lazarus should function. The final resurrection of Lady
Lazarus is her answer to the spatial narrowing that is forced upon her. She is living her very
own utopia, her idea of society, turning the power system upside down. She is “eat[ing] men
like air,” as opposed to the reverse situation she has experienced before. However, in the very
moment this utopia is possibly lived, the gaze that allows her utopia of arising again from the
dead is lost as well, as the “mirror” that allows the “joint experience” is lost. (cf. 24)
As this chapter illustrates, the spaces represented in the poem “Lady Lazarus” join the

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general voice of defying the author as a real existence and intensify the reading of Lady
Lazarus as a fragmentation, constituted not by the real person, the referent, but the audience
that wants to consume her and participate in her experiences and emotions. Defying live itself,
escaping into an utopia and therefore ending her own existence is the only way for the
fragment Lady Lazarus, and possibly for the real referent herself, reduced to this
fragmentation, to overcome her imprisonment.

5 Reading “Camp Poetry”

One question that arises when reading “Lady Lazarus” as a poem defying the author is
the following: Does the poem still belong to camp poetry, as it is often classified? According
to Susan Sontag, one of the characteristics of camp is seeing “everything in quotation marks.
It's not a lamp, but a 'lamp'; not a woman, but a 'woman.' To perceive Camp in objects and
persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of
the metaphor of life as theater.” (Sontag, 1964) Obviously, following the imaginary of “Lady
Lazarus” reveals the poem as just that: Lady Lazarus is a role played out on stage to the
likening of the crowd, “the theatrical.” The way in which Lady Lazarus as a being is presented
to the reader is that of a performance, of the “big strip tease” introduced as a show act through
the addressing to the “Gentlemen, ladies.” The idea of the theatrical evolves to a point where
even death becomes a performable art: “Dying / Is an art, like everything else.” However, a
further implication of these two lines is important, in fact “everything else” is art as well.
There is no genuine experience, only the acting of perceived model roles. As Rowland noted
with the Holocaust imagery, the space Lady Lazarus inhabits is not constituted through
naturalness, but through “citations of citations.” (Rowland, 2005: 30)
Another note made by Sontag on Camp is its spirit of extravagance: “Camp is a woman
walking around in a dress made of three million feathers.” (Sontag, 1964) This rather
excessive example can be taken by word in the case of “Lady Lazarus”, in the end the main
protagonist is transcending into a bird, a phoenix, with her “red hair” as a symbolism for both
her plumage and the burning fury of vengeance within her, possibly initiated through the
melting and burning that announces her last death in the poem. Nonetheless, the poem also
depicts the imagery of another exaggeration, that of a spare appearance. Lady Lazarus is only

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“skin and bone,” her face “featureless, fine.” This juxtaposed imagery highly contradicts with
the imagery of the extravagant, and it defies the categorization of Camp. However, according
to Rowland this is one of the main features of Syliva Plath's camp poetry: “By stretching
metaphors until it breaks down, Plath highlights both the artifice of the October poems, and
the potentially camp nature of poetry itself, which has the capacity to transform a mundane
incident […] into a metaphyiscal dilemma.” (Rowland, 2005: 30) As such, the Camp as
present in “Lady Lazarus” is not Sontag's idea of “naive camp,” but that which “knows itself
to be Camp ('camping').” (Sontag, 1964)
And Lady Lazarus resists the Camp classification in another aspect, that of politicism:
“It goes without saying that the Camp sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized – or at least
apolitical.” To say that “Lady Lazarus” is an apolitical poem would not do justice to its
content. The Holocaust imagery in itself, combined with the strong criticism to the media
spectacle that was a result of the Buchenwald Trial and the fetishising of the person Ilse Koch.
Furthermore, the utilizing of the Holocaust icons to express the perverted and ruthless desire
and search for the author of a work generates another inherent level of meaning.
Following Fabio Cleto's shorter definition of Camp, the entirety of the poem is easier to
fit in:

First, everyone agrees that camp is a style […] that favors 'exaggeration', 'artifice', and
'extremity'. Second, camp exists in tension with popular culture, commercial culture,
or consumerist culture. Third, the person who can recognize camp, who sees things as
campy, or who can camp is a person outside the cultural mainstream. Fourth, camp is
affiliated with homosexual culture, or at least with a self-conscious eroticism that
throws into question the naturalisation of desire. (1999: 4)

“Lady Lazarus” is indeed in strong tension with commercial and consumerist culture, strongly
criticizing its implications on the cultural construct of “the author.” Lady Lazarus, violently
shifted to the outside of culture, into an utopia, can understand the campiness of her
surrounding, of the role playing that constitutes the whole human experience. And it questions
the naturalisation of the almost cannibalistic desire for the one and only author, for this
constructed fragment the reader and critic is trying to find between the lines of a poem.
However, one cannot defy the feeling that “Lady Lazarus” establishes these images without

14
being fully aware of the campiness, of “camping” it. Therefore, “Lady Lazarus” is probably
best described with Rowland's general comment for the late poetry of Sylvia Plath: “Many of
the October 1962 poems are camp, but they are not products of the Camp movement.” (2005:
31) “Lady Lazarus” does establish some of the characteristics of Camp, but makes a
distinction between the useful traits and those that would not serve any purpose in the
construction of the poem.

6 Conclusion

As this paper has shown “Lady Lazarus” functions as a poem opposing the ideological
force of imposing a definite, genuine author to a specific literary work. Instead, it turns this
power against its aggressors, “transgressing its own limits” and “eating” the reader “like air.”
Lady Lazarus as a fragment of the real author manages to “rise out of the ashes,” to be
constituted by the interpreter himself. It is a deferred existence, that ultimately does not
provide him with a conclusion to his quest of finding the author person, but instead gives him
only an illusion: “When the has been found, the text is 'explained' – victory to the critic.”
(Barthes, 1988: 171) However, in the end the text, the poem will win over its critic, as it
cannot be deciphered, for its “author” is already deconstructed, displaced, and substituted with
its signifier. The figure of Lady Lazarus works as a phantasmagoria of the desire for the
author and its constructed personality. It is a reduction to an “opus”, a “valuable.”
However, this reading of Sylvia Plath's poetry bares a layer that suffers from similar
problems as the autobiographical approach presented in chapter two. While Lady Lazarus is
not identified with Plath as author, she is still understood as the speaking voice of her,
denouncing the “witch hunt” of the crowd, the reduction of her person. As such, even in
refusing an autobiographical reading of “Lady Lazarus”, it is difficult to do so without
envisioning Sylvia Plath.
If the poem still works as “Camp” is difficult to answer, as the understanding and
defining of the term is too vague. On a political level, however, it cannot fulfil the idea of a
campy poem, instead it implements a harsh and deep criticism on media spectacle and the
related desire of the masses for any breathtaking headlines. The Holocaust imagery is no
imprudent act of self-pity, but instead an allegory for this condition.

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 7 Bibliography

Primary Literature

Plath, Sylvia. Ariel: The Restored Edition. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. Print.

Secondary Literature

Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. Ed.
David Lodge. London: Routledge, 1988. 167-72. Print.

Bawer, Bruce. “Sylvia Plath and the Poetry of Confession.” Sylvia Plath – Updated Edition. Ed.
Harold Bloom. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2007. 7-20. Print.

Bloom, Harold. Sylvia Plath – Updated Edition. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2007. Print.

Cleto, Fabio. Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh UP, 1999. Print.

Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16.1 (Spring 1986): 22-7. Print.

Foucault, Michel. “What is an author?” Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. Ed. David
Lodge. London: Routledge, 1988. 197-210. Print.

Gill, Jo. The Cambridge Introduction to Sylvia Plath. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008. Print.

Gubar, Susan. “Prosopopoeia and Holocaust Poetry in English: Sylvia Plath and Her
Contemporaries.” Sylvia Plath – Updated Edition. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Infobase Publishing,
2007. 165-91. Print.

Hall, Caroline K. B. Sylvia Plath, Revised. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998. Print.

Lodge, David. Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. London: Routledge, 1988. Print.

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 Mitchell, Paul. “Reading (and) the late Poems of Sylvia Plath.” The Modern Language Review
100.1 (January 2005): 37-50. Print.

Rowland, Antony. Holocaust Poetry: Awkward Poetics in the Work of Sylvia Plath, Geoffrey
Hill, Tony Harrison and Ted Hughes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2005. Print.

Sontag, Susan. “Notes on 'Camp'.” Georgetown University. 1964. Web. 16 Aug. 2014.

Wagner-Martin, Linda. Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life. Houndmills: MacMillan Press, 1999. Print.

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